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“Artificial intelligence in particular conjures the notion of thinking machines. But no machine can think, and no software is truly intelligent. The phrase alone may be one of the most successful marketing terms of all time.” – Parmy Olsen, Bloomberg columnist. ($) March 27th, 2023 | 61 comments
 Some work is going on under the hood, so Samizdata may be a bit dyspeptic for a while until things get sorted. Here are some cat pictures to make you less sad.
March 26th, 2023 | 6 comments
There is much anger in Ireland over the country’s ongoing housing crisis. The Dail put in place an eviction ban over the winter. It got them some good headlines for a while, but the ban had the usual effect of driving smaller landlords out of the market, making the crisis worse. The ban is due to expire on 31st March. This will result in many people being evicted simultaneously on 1st April. Reddit Ireland is outraged. Here is a thread titled “Disgraceful” about how many Airbnb properties are available compared to how few long term rental properties. In fact the comparison is false. As a commenter called “Th0rHere” says, “Airbnb shows listings even when booked (to make future bookings possible). Daft [a property website] shows only available places to rent right now, as your not going to advertise place to rent if it’s already being rented. These numbers are not comparable.” Even so, it is true that an awful lot of Irish properties that used to be let to long term tenants are now given over to Airbnb. I have posted about the issue a couple of times. Why is this happening? Why would anyone choose the constant work and uncertainty of letting out their property as an Airbnb over the stability of having a long term tenant? On that same “Disgraceful” thread, a Reddit Ireland commenter called “RestrepoDoc2” explained why:
RestrepoDoc2’s comment got 3 upvotes, one of which was mine. A comment from “Irish_drunkard” saying, “We banned Uber because it would effect our taxi business, why can’t we ban AirBNB?” got 985 upvotes. March 25th, 2023 | 12 comments
“A bank without a chief risk officer is a bit like a football team without a left tackle. It’s not the sexiest position on the field, and most fans couldn’t recognize him without a helmet, but what the left tackle does is crucial. He’s the guy protecting the quarterback’s blind side when a 250-pound pass rusher is trying to pulverize him. Silicon Valley Bank not having a chief risk officer for a brutal year in tech was the equivalent of that left tackle walking off the field during a blitz.” – Ben Cohen, Wall Street Journal ($). He is reflecting on how Silicon Valley Bank did not have a chief risk officer in place for eight months. The reason why classical liberals should focus on this aspect of the bank’s demise is because at the moment there are calls for yet more rules and regulations on banks. But the problem in my view is that there are plenty of rules, but they aren’t often enforced consistently, or intelligently. (Apologies to non-followers of NFL football, but I think you get the point of it.) But Cohen adds this important caveat, which is another twist on the whole “moral hazard” argument that we hear about a lot when banks fail: “The existence of a chief risk officer created the appearance of proper oversight and satisfied regulators, but having someone to police risk meant the traders actually taking those risks might have felt they didn’t have to be so vigilant.” Hmm. So in the end, having a CRO in place might, ironically, make a bank even more cocky because of the assumption that there is a person there to keep everyone on-point. March 24th, 2023 | 14 comments
Vlad Vexler noticed that nearly everyone online was certain that Putin sent a body double to Mariupol rather than visiting himself. Then he ran a poll, which revealed that most people weren’t quite so sure, and actually more people thought it was more likely that Putin did go himself. The point being that it is very hard to tell from the shouting and hollering in, say, social media commentary, what proportion of people really agree with a thing.
It can work the other way, too. In Vexler’s example, if the BBC writes an article and 7000 comments complain about it and only 1000 comments agree with it, it might become scared of shifting tides of culture, that the majority are against them, and they might start to take defensive measures; to treat as normal a minority opinion. Vexler argues that these kinds of misjudgements cause political shifts and are dangerous for democracy. Even on a small scale I think it is unhelpful to go around thinking that Twitter, for example, reveals very much about what people are, in general, thinking. You are almost certainly wrong, one way or another, about how many people agree with you*. *Unless you are libertarian. Then the answer is 11 March 23rd, 2023 | 15 comments
To the majority of people who believe lockdowns were right and necessary, the Covid era was no doubt distressing, but it need not have been cause to re-order their perception of the world. Faced with a new and frightening disease, difficult decisions were taken by the people in charge but we came together and got through it; mistakes were made, but overall we did what we needed to do. For the dissenting minority, the past three years have been very different. We have had to grapple with the possibility that, through panic and philosophical confusion, our governing class contrived to make a bad situation much worse. Imagine living with the sense that the manifold evils of the lockdowns that we all now know — ripping up centuries-old traditions of freedom, interrupting a generation’s education, hastening the decline into decrepitude for millions of older people, destroying businesses and our health service, dividing families, saddling our economies with debt, fostering fear and alienation, attacking all the best things in life — needn’t have happened for anything like so long, if at all? March 23rd, 2023 | 18 comments
Self-described “Poe/history blogger and crazy cat lady” Undine @HorribleSanity has unearthed a page from an old children’s book with a moral likely to disturb most modern readers:
When I was a child my mother told me that when she was a child in the late 1930s and early 1940s it was still routine for litters of kittens to be drowned. There was a local man who probably made a living as a general odd-job man but who my mother and her sister hated because they saw him only in his role as “the kitten-drowner”. When my grandmother called him round to do the deed, my mother and her sister would hide while it was done and be upset for days afterwards. But what else were people to do back then? If nature is allowed to take its course, a female cat can easily bear three litters a year. Let’s say three kittens per litter. Where you had one cat you now have ten, and it is not just your Tibbles doing that, but every cat in the neighbourhood, and it is not long before the kittens grow up and start mating with each other. To be sure, the geometric progression will not continue forever. That’s because in a society that has no practical means to stop them breeding, most stray cats either starve to death or are killed by the almost equally uncontrollable population of stray dogs. Unless, that is, someone spares them from this miserable life and lingering death by killing them in a relatively merciful way soon after birth. Dogs, it is true, can usually be kept from breeding by not letting them run loose. But for most of human history the whole point of having a cat was that it would feed itself and earn its place in a human home by killing mice. It can’t do that on a lead. Commercially made cat food began to be produced in the 1930s. So it did exist when my mother was a child but only as a luxury product. Her family were far from rich. Their cats were given table scraps to supplement their main diet of mice, but the idea of paying for meat to feed a cat when humans often went without would have seemed ridiculous. Given that she is a history blogger with a specific interest in what TV Tropes calls “Values Dissonance”, I am sure Undine knows all this, but some of her audience clearly have not thought it through. “I hope whoever wrote that is burning in hell,” says one of the replies to her tweet. Rather than call down damnation on people for whom killing kittens was the least inhumane option, it would be better to call down blessings on those who made it no longer necessary. Those who developed anaesthetics are rightly praised for having freed humans from much suffering, both by making surgical operations pain-free and by making surgery more likely to succeed because it no longer had to be done at speed. These benefits quickly filtered down to animals, too, first to bulls and stallions, and then on to smaller animals like cats and dogs. They can do surgery on hamsters now. If you think that wasteful, remember that the benefit of being able to save a pet goes not just to the animal but to the humans who love it. As I said, we rightly praise the pioneers of medicine who made this happy situation possible – but the biggest driver in changing possibility to fact was the capitalist system that made us so much richer than our ancestors. We can afford to buy food specially for cats. We can afford to take cats to the vets to get the snip, and to have their annual injections done and their ailments treated. Now that their offspring are greatly reduced in number, we can afford to support animal shelters that will find homes for them if the card in the newsagent’s window doesn’t work. We can afford not to drown kittens. March 22nd, 2023 | 15 comments
“Deposit insurance is a cancer at the heart of the capitalist system, destroying its ethical foundations. Rich depositors should not be able to secure returns, in the good times, for investing in fundamentally riskbearing activities (which fractional reserve deposits are, by their nature) but then be bailed out by the government when times are tougher. And banks are the largest allocators of capital in the economy – so this fundamental injustice gets spread across the entire economic system.” – Andrew Lilico, The Sunday Telegraph (£) A problem in much of the West is that the large investors who have been bailed out, such as those who did so via Silicon Valley Bank, or Credit Suisse, etc, is that they tend to be politically quite powerful. A lot of the north Californian business class, for instance. And it tends to vote Democratic. March 21st, 2023 | 25 comments
I like the following comments by Adrian Wooldridge, the journalist, writing in Bloomberg ($ paywall) a week ago:
I’d like to quote the whole article but there is a copyright/subscription issue, and I am a free marketeer and respecter of property, after all. March 20th, 2023 | 26 comments
Far from robbing anybody of surplus value, Capitalism is like a benevolent ancestor who, instead of consuming all the port that he could get – as some ancestors did – laid down an enormous cellar of it for the use of future generations. And every one who is now alive in this country, and millions abroad likewise, are now able to help themselves to bottles of the grand old vintage then laid down and now ready for us, crusted, fruity, full of ripe flavour and rich bouquet. For none of us could have been so well off, and many of us could not have been born at all, if Capitalism had not done this deed, and done it judiciously and well. – Hartley Withers, The Case for Capitalism, 1920 p239. Withers was editor of the Economist between 1916 and 1921. It’s a good analogy, or ought to be. It ought to make you think of science, shipping, railways, hospitals, educational institutions. Unfortunately, in my case it – especially the “rich bouquet” bit – makes me think of sewers. March 20th, 2023 | 16 comments
We are now forewarned that the British government has chosen St. George’s Day, 23rd April 2023, to trial a new ‘alert’ system by sending alerts to the phones of everyone in the UK. It seems that you have to interact with the phone to stop it blaring a siren-like noise at you, and so acknowledge this impertinence. However, not all phones can receive these ‘alerts’. The functionality is limited:
But you can turn off these alerts on your phone (if you are socially-unfriendly):
Blimey, something the government acknowledges that it can’t help me with, is this a first? But what, pray, is this all for?
One might hope that severe flooding and fires would be incompatible, but perhaps with the climate emergency, Mr Sunak will set the Thames on fire. And the form of this message? Not exactly:
OK, but what should I do if I get an ‘alert’?
But does this apply to say, surgeons in an operating theatre? This is not mentioned. And wait, what if I am…
Well at least that’s clear… What is the legal basis for the government taking this power, and why is this not explained? And presumably, if there’s someone running amok with knives or guns, this won’t be part of the alert system, when it might actually be unexpected, unlike the weather. I can see where this is going. It will eventually be used to warn people that Nigel Farage is making a speech locally and that they should stay indoors and not follow the event on social media. Sorry, I was being overly cynical there, I have seen this:
That’s good to know, I had been wondering if it would. And I am pleased to hear that I won’t be getting messages from Robert Spencer if there is a certain type of rare incident in the locality. Then again, what if there is a hippo on the loose? Is there a template alert message for that, if not, why not? Are you seriously trying to protect us? Will it sound if there is, say, an unexpected landing on a beach by persons unknown? Around 35 years ago, the late Auberon Waugh said that people only go into politics for the pleasure of pressing switches and watching us all jump. This figure of speech has become reality. March 19th, 2023 | 25 comments
Oxfam has come a long way since it was founded 81 years ago. There was a time in the dim and distant past when its primary purpose was to raise money from well-meaning, relatively affluent folks and use their donations to assuage the hunger pangs of the poor and downtrodden across the globe. It was a worthy cause. Those days are long over. For some time now it’s been more associated with Left-wing agitprop than famine relief. Indeed, you almost get the impression feeding the famished is now seen by some in Oxfam as an annoying diversion from the far more important work of political activism. – Andrew Neill, of whom I am not a great fan overall but this is certainly true. March 19th, 2023 | 13 comments
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